Resources:

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS

FLOWERS were used as emblems long before their language was formulated, and they were also used for messages because their meaning could be understood by those who could neither read nor write. Ophelia says in Hamlet, ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance . . . and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts’, and John Donne, in the middle of the seventeenth century, wrote of ‘the Alphabet of flowers’. But the language of flowers did not capture the imagination of the western world until the end of the eighteenth century.

The language is oriental in origin and became known in England through a letter written by Lady Mary Wortley Montague in 1718 and published in her Letters in 1763. She said that in Turkey, ‘There is no colour, no flower, no weed, no fruit, herb, pebble or feather, that has not a verse belonging to it; and you may quarrel, reproach, or send letters of passion, friendship or civility, or even of news, without inking your fingers’. The ‘verses’ were single lines or phrases, rhyming with the name of the flower or object. The love-letter that she described as an example consisted not only of flowers but also a pearl, spices, paper, gold thread, hair, coal and soap — the soap meaning ‘I am sick with love’.

Henry Phillips, in the foreword to his Floral Emblems (1825), describes how Turkish ladies sent messages of invitation or congratulation accompanied by a few symbolic flowers wrapped in an embroidered handkerchief. The freshness of the flowers indicated the speed of the messenger, their selection the sentiment to be conveyed, while the beauty and value of the wrapping denoted the rank of the sender. The advantages of perishable love-letters are obvious, but Henry Phillips insists that this kind of symbolic communication was a survival of a very ancient practice and not invented solely for the purposes of intrigue.

The eastern flower-code became popular in eighteenth-century France, and Phillips tells the story of a prisoner of the French Revolution who sent his daughter two dried lilies shortly before his execution, ‘to express both the purity of his heart and the fate which awaited him’.

Many books and a great deal of bad poetry were written on this subject, but to what extent the language was used is a matter for speculation. The provident writer of floral letters would have had to plant the most useful varieties in his own garden, and even then he could not compile a message if half of it bloomed in the spring and the rest in the autumn. He would also have had to make sure that the recipient used the same book of flower language as himself. According to Phillips the dahlia stands for instability and the iris for eloquence, whereas in Floral Emblems by ‘A Lady of Title’ the dahlia means ‘thine for ever’ and the iris only ‘a message’. Both she and Phillips agree that basil stands for poverty, but in The Language of Flowers by Kate Greenaway it means hatred. Drawings were some-times substituted for living flowers, but this entailed a high degree of draughts-manship and botanical knowledge if mis-understandings were to be avoided.

Phillips enlarged the vocabulary by attaching meanings (of a moral and ele-vating kind) to a number of flowers not included in the older traditions, such as the recently introduced dahlia and hydrangea, and he also tried to invent a code for dates and numbers, using compound leaves, berries and tendrils. But the language was never designed for any practical purpose — its emblems represented only abstractions and states of mind, and there were no verbs except for a few occurring in short phrases.

There were probably minor revivals of the language of flowers in Victorian times, because vocabularies were still being published in the 1870s, but the language had died out by the end of the century.

The significance of flowers is, however, universal and some at least of their meanings will always hold good. The following list has been compiled from the three books mentioned above: